The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is booming, with nearly every major player in the enterprise space vying for a foothold. IBM, Amazon, GE, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, SAP, HPE, Verizon--you name it, anybody and everybody, even folks who used to sell hardware--are actively working on and/or want to stake a claim in a piece of the AI pie. What encompasses the AI market? Machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), voice recognition and image processing, application and geography are what we're looking at, with mobile devices and cloud being the enablers. And just what will the AI market be?

The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC), as a theory in the social science, gets a new paradigm in computer science. The WOC theory explains that the aggregate decision made by a group is often better than those of its individual members if specific conditions are satisfied. This paper presents a novel framework for unsupervised and semi-supervised cluster ensemble by exploiting the WOC theory. We employ four conditions in the WOC theory, i.e., diversity, independency, decentralization and aggregation, to guide both the constructing of individual clustering results and the final combination for clustering ensemble. Firstly, independency criterion, as a novel mapping system on the raw data set, removes the correlation between features on our proposed method. Then, decentralization as a novel mechanism generates high-quality individual clustering results. Next, uniformity as a new diversity metric evaluates the generated clustering results. Further, weighted evidence accumulation clustering method is proposed for the final aggregation without using thresholding procedure. Experimental study on varied data sets demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art methods.

The availability of graph data with node attributes that can be either discrete or real-valued is constantly increasing. While existing kernel methods are effective techniques for dealing with graphs having discrete node labels, their adaptation to non-discrete or continuous node attributes has been limited, mainly for computational issues. Recently, a few kernels especially tailored for this domain, and that trade predictive performance for computational efficiency, have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a graph kernel for complex and continuous nodes' attributes, whose features are tree structures extracted from specific graph visits. The kernel manages to keep the same complexity of state-of-the-art kernels while implicitly using a larger feature space. We further present an approximated variant of the kernel which reduces its complexity significantly. Experimental results obtained on six real-world datasets show that the kernel is the best performing one on most of them. Moreover, in most cases the approximated version reaches comparable performances to current state-of-the-art kernels in terms of classification accuracy while greatly shortening the running times.

Drone boats belonging to the U.S. Navy have begun learning to work together like a swarm with a shared hive mind. Two years ago, they would have individually reacted to possible threats by all swarming over like a chaotic group of kids learning to play soccer for the first time. Now the drone boats have showed that they can cooperate intelligently as a team to defend a harbor area against intruders. The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) held its latest robot swarm demonstration in the lower Chesapeake Bay off the Virginia coast for about a month. Four drone boats showed off their improved control and navigation software by patrolling an area of 4 nautical miles by 4 nautical miles. If they spotted a possible threat, the swarm of roboboats would collectively decide which of them would go track and trail the intruder vessel.

IN the summer of 1956, a remarkable collection of scientists and engineers gathered at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Among them were computer scientist Marvin Minsky, information theorist Claude Shannon and two future Nobel prizewinners, Herbert Simon and John Nash. Their task: to spend the summer months inventing a new field of science called "artificial intelligence" (AI). They did not lack in ambition, writing in their funding application: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." Their wish list was "to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves". They thought that "a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

Last month, people in India woke up to the news about the largest data breach in the country. It involved data stolen from 3.2 million debit cards between 25 May and 10 July from a network of bank ATMs, managed by a Japanese payment services company. However, the breach was reported in the media only on 21 October. This fraud is simply a case in point. It was only this January, for instance, that the data of over 7 million users of the mobile edition of the popular game Minecraft was breached.

Competition that results in better care for people suffering from visual impairments is the right kind of competition. Following a path similar to that of Google's DeepMind, Microsoft India announced this morning that it's launching a new research group, the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, to bring data-driven eyecare services to India. Whereas DeepMind's swing at ophthalmology targeted the UK, Microsoft's ambitions are a considerably more global. The tech company is working alongside researchers from the United States, Brazil, Australia and, of course, India to train machine learning models that can identify conditions that can lead to blindness. Microsoft's key strategic partnership is with the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country.

If you ask Elon Musk, it's possible we already have. That's right: Artificial Intelligence is creeping into every area of our lives. AI is now a big part of the Microsoft strategy. Your least favorite but most used application of all time (that would be PowerPoint) can generate slides automatically with just a click and can write captions, making us all seem a little superfluous in some ways. In a New Yorker article this week (that is not online quite yet), there was a side comment about how a factory in China figured out how to produce the same number of parts using robots and with around 50,000 fewer employees.

To ramp up its contribution to global fights against money laundering and terrorism financing, South Korea will introduce an artificial intelligence-based system to better filter out financial crimes, said the country's financial intelligence chief. Yoo Kwang-yeol, commissioner of the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit, said his agency is currently working to upgrade the main system that stores and analyzes information regarding hundreds of millions of financial transactions in order to increase accuracy of capturing suspicious transactions out of normal ones. Yoo Kwang-yeol, commissioner of Korea Financial Intelligence Unit speaks during an interview at his office in Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, Dec. 6. For this, a group of KOFIU experts paid a trip to Australia earlier this month to learn from the Australian financial intelligence system. "AI can help improve efficiency of sorting out suspicious financial transactions and accuracy of analyzing related account information," Yoo said.

The TechCrunch conference is an event that swoops in on the startup scenes of the US and Europe, gathering for appraisal the technology world's rising movers, shakers and innovators. It's widely regarded as the place to get a feel for what's happening at the industry's grassroots – which is exactly what PwC Innovation Manager Marina Paronetto headed to London to do. As it turns out, it was the brains behind the machine – artificial intelligence – that was the star of 2016's show. It was said in sarcasm, but MC Jordan Crook couldn't have been more accurate when she said that TechCrunch's theme for its latest Disrupt conference was artificial intelligence. From what I saw, every solution on show here featured an element of AI.